


Longing For Lullabies

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Character Death, Demons, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-10
Updated: 2015-12-10
Packaged: 2018-05-06 00:34:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5396012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Where does it begin: in the fade, or in two people in pain?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Longing For Lullabies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LaviniaD](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaviniaD/gifts).



> LaviniaD prompted me to write a Dorian/Bull piece about demonic possession or an Envy-style attempt. I... took the broadest possible interpretation.
> 
> Welcome to weird fade bullshit hour.
> 
> See endnotes for clarification of the character death tag, with spoilers.

A beginning. Not the first beginning, perhaps not the most important. We'll get to that. 

But a person has to begin somewhere.

So this, for now, is it:

 

 

There is a wall of water, and the water is a smooth mirror. Black sand below you, and your reflection walking at your side. 

The sand grinds under your feet, as much a feeling as a sound. There is no end to the wall. It runs straight ahead, a beautiful line to the murky horizon. You can't stay here you can't stay here you can't—changed changing changeable, all wrong—

Turn. Touch the mirror-surface, fingertip to fingertip with your blank-eyed reflection.

A dizzy plunge into ice-cold water as the perspective flips.

 

 

Dorian regained consciousness with his own hand on his throat, the ache of cold water tight and unpleasant in his head, hands tingling in shock at the warmth of the room. Gasped. 

His lungs took in stale air.

On the floor below him, the complicated lines of a ritual, sticky with blood. 

He choked at the smell. Retched.

His limbs shook, slow to obey. Get up, get up. Get up _now_.

I am Dorian Pavus and I am a talented mage and a professional disappointment and I will never marry. I am twenty-seven years old. I want—

I want.

I want, so much, to live.

Get up.

He got up, hauled himself up by the corner of the desk. His father's desk, of course, his father's. His father's study, his father's books, his father's fucking sigil. Not, however, his father's blood.

Raised voices in the hall.

"—risk! What do you propose now? Is this to your satisfaction? What are we to do with a _dead son_?"

Rather premature of you, Mother. 

He took a deep, trembling breath. Focused on steadying himself. How wrong he felt in his skin, as though he had been pulled entirely out of shape. Filled with an urgent, furious desire: to be anywhere but here. Run, run, never stop.

His parent's faces when he stumbled into the hall bore expressions of undisguised shock.

" _Dorian_." His father's voice, hoarse, disbelieving. 

"Fuck you," Dorian said. His own voice was just as hoarse. Savage. It might have belonged to another person.

Oh, how his father wanted—

He didn't give two shits what his father wanted. 

What a freeing thought, in the middle of it all, smeared with blood, dizzy and sick with it. How long he had lived with the desires of others.

He left.

 

 

It was difficult, of course, to sleep; to close one's eyes was to relive, and to dream was to be pulled at by the fade, claws and teeth. It, too, found him to be the wrong shape. 

He spent those first months exhausted and angry and full of a longing he found it difficult to name. How many people did he fuck, reassuring himself that he was not as his father had intended? He had always enjoyed sex; nothing terribly peculiar about that, surely, even if his tastes were considered socially unfortunate. He was very beautiful. He played all these games very well. Men desired him. Had always desired him. And as for his own desires—

Well, they were intact, at least. Impossible and overwhelming and as they had always been. Never enough.

You are no son of mine.

No, father, I suppose I'm not.

He ran, and ran, and ran. City to city, testing the patience of old friends; Dorian, are you well? you seem different. And why shouldn't he be different? Now, when his Maker-forsaken father had quite nearly killed him—what did they expect of him, precisely?

If he stood still, it would all catch up with him.

He could have kept running for a very long time indeed. But then there was the matter of Gereon and Felix Alexius, and there was Redcliffe. 

And there was a man.

 

 

Or, perhaps, this is where we begin: two men stare at each other, and very nearly realise—what?

 

 

There was a man in the Chantry in Redcliffe. An unsettling man, a familiar unfamiliar one.

"The pretty ones are always the worst," the Bull said. Thought of claws.

The man flashed a brilliant smile.

The Bull thought of desire.

Not: the Bull desired him, although sure, why wouldn't he.

He thought of the concept itself. A terrible, selfish thing.

But of course, Dorian was neither terrible nor selfish. A little angry, sure. More than a little desperate to be wanted, and kind of afraid of it at the same time. 

Why that thought, then? Why the certainty, irrational and unsanctioned, that the man had something to do with him?

Dorian, flashing anger, brilliant and beautiful. We're going to fuck, the Bull thought, a week in. One day. If he decides he's up for it. 

He thought:

Qun be damned. 

No, no, not that. Not the anger, and never anger at the Qun. The Qun is the only sanity.

He shut that last angry thought away. Locked it up deep below the surface. Ashkaari, who he was not permitted to be, had been a creature of doubts. Hissrad had been a creature of certainty. The Bull—needed, tried to direct his fury. Tried to believe. Found that care, of all things, made it easier. 

To be what was needed.

 

 

Seheron: the reeducators fed him bitter things, things that made his head swim, blurred the edges of his world. What is your name. What is your rank. What is your purpose.

It is to be.

It is to be.

It is to be.

Hissrad's head hung, heavy between his shoulders. His breathing was slow, slow, slow. 

In a stream of words, he was remade. All this rage. What was it for?

 

 

Seheron. They were dead. They were _dead_ , those fucking bastards, and he was still so angry. No satisfaction to it.

Blood on his face, blood running down his arm, along the haft of his maul. 

This is how much blood a man can lose and be saved. Oh, but he'd passed that line three enemies ago, hadn't he? How did he stand? Only rage, blinding wrath, the field of his vision narrowing.

He didn't stand now. Knelt, blood soaking through the knees of his trousers. Laboured breaths.

It's not enough. They're dead and I'm dying and it's never going to be enough.

He'd never wanted to give a single one of them the pleasure. Damn them all. Killing Tamassrans, killing Imekari. Killing his men—

He wasn't ready to let it go.

He sank. Plunged into darkness.

Into freezing water.

 

 

And surfaced.

 

 

Another beginning. Perhaps the first, this, although one might question whether things can begin at all in the Fade. Perhaps the last. What is time here, after all?

Like this:

 

 

This is not your home. A space which was not made for you, which does not bend itself to your form. 

But it is not the home of the other either. 

Twist together. Claws and teeth, beautiful and ruinous. All smaller fears and horrors skitter away, as though they themselves are afraid, horrified. Ridiculous. To be a thing is not to feel it.

Fucking, fighting. In a way, it's the same thing.

Desire does not feel desire; it embodies it, nourishes it. Likewise, wrath is not angry. But, perhaps, in this moment, this now, which has already happened and is still happening and will presumably always be happening—in this moment you, who are desire, feel wrath. 

You, who are wrath, feel desire.

It takes root, and once it has taken root, it has always been there.

No, not always. There has at some point been a _before_ , hasn't there? No, not before that, the thing which has happened and is now forever. Rather: before any of this. Before wrath and desire. A time in which there was a purpose.

Does that, then, have anything to do with the protective curl of what are for the moment wrath's hands around what is for the moment desire's waist? With the strange flare of care that brightens in desire?

It is unlike you to consider these things. 

It is unlike you to consider concepts like "before" or "after" at all. Those things are lost. They have, now, never been.

Wrath is giving, has given, will give itself great horns, tearing claws. Desire is, has, will be shuddering in pleasure at the sight, the feeling. 

Wrath's claws, tearing into desire, are touching the heart of it. You. Me.

Desire does not _have_ a heart. Did not. Has, now, always had.

Is this, then, how a demon falls? You reach out to twist the fade around you and it does not recognise you as one of its own. You reach out to twist the fade around you and it twists you instead. It says: I see what you are. You are no demon after all. You had a purpose, and you lost it; you had a role, and you perverted it. You are—

And you fall. Crash down into a space that fits. Allow it, in its turn, to shape you.

You do not, at least, fall alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilery notes on character death tag: technically, Dorian and Bull both die in this story and are replaced by demons. To put another angle on it: Dorian and Bull in this version of Inquisition are ex-demons who weren't demony enough, but don't know it.


End file.
